Michelle of the Masses
Dateline: 07/21/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages
"No commercial sites. No men. No fluff." Just the "personal homepages of the female masses."
Welcome to fem•mass, a directory of women's web pages like no other.
Its creator is LMichelle (L. Michelle Johnson), herself the tender of an extraordinary homepage that is deep and expressive, full of life and humor.
But first, why fem•mass is important. There are other, better known (and much larger) directories of women's sites. These include the WWWomen Webring and Wise Women of the Web. But few bother to explain anything about the sites they link to, much less the criteria for inclusion. LMichelle set out to do something altogether different.
I had seen other lists of women's homepages, but a lot were only a name and a link, and the quality of the pages varied greatly. So I decided to create fem•mass for pages that 'shined.' It would include their picture so you could see the woman behind the page, and a quote of my choice from their site so you could hear their voice."
Fem•mass is now a year-and-a-half-old and contains 119 "shining lights." LMichelle accepts about half the submissions she receives, and news of the site has spread primarily through word of mouth. I encourage you to browse through it.
But what of the woman who chooses the sites? What kind of site does she keep?
The Personal Homepage of LMichelle is not easily categorized. Its contents range from "Soul Searching", a searing series of collages and diary entries she calls "the closing rites for my depression," and "Black and Blue", her experience as an "ordinary woman" in a violent relationship, to the lighthearted "Michelles of the Web" ("We're Michelle and we're proud!") and the priceless, penile "Heartless's Holey Haven." The latter is about to make it onto Playboy's list of the Top 25 sex sites, a circumstance she finds hilariously ironic.
This is a woman who has found her medium.
